The cooling and heating of commercial buildings and residential homes is typically accomplished via forced air and forced hot or cooled water distribution systems. A furnace, heat pump, other fossil fuel furnace, and/or air conditioner are typically used to supply heated air or cooled air to areas of the building or home via ducts. Such distribution systems are often controlled by a single thermostat which is centrally located within the building or home. A person sets the thermostat to a particular temperature setting. When the temperature measured by the thermostat deviates a pre-defined amount from the set temperature, a furnace, heat pump, other fossil fuel furnace, or air conditioner is turned on to provide heated or cooled air to the various regions of the building or home via the duct work or water lines.
Even though the desired temperature may be achieved at the location of the thermostat, the resultant temperatures in the various other regions of the building or home may still deviate quite a bit from this desired temperature. Therefore, a single centrally located thermostat likely will not provide adequate temperature control for individual rooms and areas. In an attempt to address this problem, duct work and valves throughout the building or home are fitted with manually adjustable registers or dampers which help to control the flow of air to the various regions. The dampers and valves are typically each adjusted to a single position and left in that state. Such an adjustment may be fine for a particular time of year, outside temperature level, and humidity level, but is likely not optimal for most other times of the year and other temperature and humidity levels. Furthermore, such an adjustment may only be fine for a particular time of day due to the internal and external daily load variances that occur depending on, for example, the position of the sun, whether or not lights are on, and how many people are in a particular area. It is often time consuming and difficult to re-adjust the dampers and valves for optimal comfort level.
The industry has developed multi-zone control systems in an attempt to better control the environmental parameters in each room or region of a home or building, for example, by placing thermostats in each larger room or groups of rooms. However, such systems to date have not been flexible enough to be entirely successful. For example, if a thermostat in a first room calls for heat, a furnace may be turned on to provide the heat. However, some of this heat may still be getting distributed to other rooms which do not presently require heat. As a result, these other rooms may become uncomfortably warm. Having multiple furnaces, air conditioners, and/or heat pumps which are connected to different thermostats and service only certain rooms may help this problem, however, this tends to be an expensive solution due to the extra equipment required and resulting service charges.
Heat pumps are relatively inexpensive to operate and can both heat air and cool air. Heat pumps use a refrigeration system to cool air and use the same refrigeration system run in reverse to heat air. Environmental control of several zones via heat pumps typically calls for a separate heat pump and thermostat for each zone or installation of a multi-zone system as previously described.
In view of the foregoing discussion, it is apparent that there is a need for a more efficient way of controlling the distribution of air and environmental parameters for several zones in a building or home.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems and methods with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.